Among cartographic generalisation problems, the generalisation of sinuous bends in mountain roads has always been a popular one due to its difficulty. Recent research showed the potential of deep learning techniques to overcome some remaining research problems regarding the automation of cartographic generalisation. This paper explores this potential on the popular mountain road generalisation problem, which requires smoothing the road, enlarging the bend summits, and schematising the bend series by removing some of the bends. We modelled the mountain road generalisation as a deep learning problem by generating an image from input vector road data, and tried to generate it as an output of the model a new image of the generalised roads. Similarly to previous studies on building generalisation, we used a U-Net architecture to generate the generalised image from the ungeneralised image. The deep learning model was trained and evaluated on a dataset composed of roads in the Alps extracted from IGN (the French national mapping agency) maps at 1:250,000 (output) and 1:25,000 (input) scale. The results are encouraging as the output image looks like a generalised version of the roads and the accuracy of pixel segmentation is around 65%. The model learns how to smooth the output roads, and that it needs to displace and enlarge symbols but does not always correctly achieve these operations. This article shows the ability of deep learning to understand and manage the geographic information for generalisation, but also highlights challenges to come.

This study proposes a template matching simplification method from the perspective of shape cognition based on the typical template characteristics of building distributions and representations. The method first formulates a series of templates to abstract the building shape by generalizing their polygons and analyzing their symbolic meanings, then conducts the simplification by searching and matching the most similar template that can be used later to replace the original building. On the premise of satisfying the individual geometric accuracy on a smaller scale, the proposed method can enhance the impression of well-known landmarks and reflect the pattern in mapping areas by the symbolic template. The turning function that describes shape by measuring the changes of the tangent-angle as a function of the arc-length is employed to obtain the similar distance between buildings and template polygons, and the least squares model is used to control the geometry matching of the candidate template. Experiments on real datasets are carried out to assess the usefulness of this method and compare it with two existing methods. The experiments suggest that our method can preserve the main structure of building shapes and geometric accuracy.

Evaluation is a key step to examine the quality of generalized maps with respect to map requirements. Map generalization facilitates the recognition of pattern generating processes by preserving and highlighting the patterns at smaller scales. This article focuses specifically on the evaluation of building patterns in topographic maps that are generalized from large to mid scales. Currently, there is a lack of knowledge and functionality on automatically evaluating how these patterns are generalized. The issues of the evaluation range from missing formal map requirements on building alignments to missing automated evaluation techniques. This article firstly analyses the requirements (constraints) related to the generalization of building alignments. Then, it focuses on three more specific constraints, i.e. on existence, orientation of alignments and spatial distribution of composing buildings. Later, a three-step approach is proposed to (1) recognize and (2) match alignments from source and generalized datasets and (3) evaluate building alignments in generalized datasets. Besides, many-to-many and partial matching between initial and target alignments is a side effect of generalization, which reduces the reliability of the evaluation results. This article introduces a confidence indicator to document the reliability and to inform intended users (e.g. cartographers) and/or systems about the reliability of evaluation decisions. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by evaluating the alignments in both interactively (manually) generalized maps and automated generalized maps. Finally, we discuss how our approach can be used to control automated generalization and identify further improvements.

In recent years, main cities in China have been suffering from hazy weather, which is gaining great attention among the public, government managers and researchers in different areas. Many studies have been conducted on the topic of urban air quality to reveal different aspects of the air quality problem in China. This paper focuses on the visualization problem of the big air quality monitoring data of all main cities on a nationwide scale. To achieve the intuitive visualization of this data set, this study develops two novel visualization tools for multi-granularity time series visualization (timezoom.js) and a dynamic symbol declutter map mashup layer for thematic mapping (symadpative.js). With the two invented tools, we develops an interactive web map visualization application of urban air quality data of all main cities in China. This application shows us significant air pollution findings at the nationwide scale. These results give us clues for further studies on air pollutant characteristics, forecasting and control in China. As the tools are invented for general visualization purposes of geo-referenced time series data, they can be applied to other environmental monitoring data (temperature, precipitation, etc.) through some configurations.

To meet the requirements of multi-scale mapping in maritime applications, marine charts need to be produced at various levels of detail (LOD) using map generalization. As a prominent geographic feature, the coastline has to be generalized considering the geomorphologic characteristics rather than from a pure geometric perspective. Morphologic and domain-specific constraints (e.g., safety) should be incorporated in designing a coastline generalization algorithm. Motivated by the generalization of ria coastlines, this article proposes a simplification algorithm that is specific to coastlines. An analysis of ria coasts results in several morphologic constraints that have to be satisfied in coastline generalization, such as the dendritic pattern of estuaries. To satisfy these constraints, a hierarchical estuary tree model is first established by Delaunay triangulation, which helps to represent the dendritic pattern of ria coastlines. Minor estuaries are then deleted to achieve a reasonable coastline simplification. To imitate manual generalization, an indicator is designed to calculate the importance of estuaries in a context dependent manner. By comparing with a well-known bend simply algorithm, we show that the presented method can maintain dendritic pattern of coastline and is free from self-intersection and also granted for navigation safety. This article also demonstrates that the proposed approach is applicable to coastlines in general.